Free Republic

The nameplates on CEO offices are changing at what appears to be an historic pace. In the first 11 months of the year, 1,991 CEOs announced their departures, according to a report from outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. That’s up 16% compared with the same timeframe last year and the highest tally on record since the firm began tracking CEO changes in 2002. This year’s high-profile breakups included Nike and John Donahoe, Intel and Pat Gelsinger, and Boeing and Dave Calhoun. With the economy going strong, the stock market on a two-year bull run, and consumer spending trending upward,...

The sky-high rent and cost of living that we've come to expect from the Bay Area might have finally taken their toll on a large proportion of residents. A huge wave of people are considering more affordable cities outside of the tech capital of the world, and they're taking their startups — and investors — with them, as Kevin Roose reported in The New York Times. San Francisco lost more residents than any other city in the country in the last quarter of 2017, according to data from real estate website Redfin, which sampled a million users. The data factored...

Arnold Schwarzenegger's improbable rise to governor in the 2003 recall election left many Californians giddy at the prospect that the state finally would have an energetic reformer at the helm after years of mismanagement in Sacramento so irresponsible that it bordered on looting. For about two years, reform was for the most part what we got. Schwarzenegger's chief goal was promoting economic growth – a business-friendly state will have more revenue to pay for its needs, he liked to note. But he also worked to restrain spending and to overhaul dysfunctional agencies – especially the prison system. Unfortunately, the painful...